It's a day of talks and screenings looking at how landscape, words, music and sound connect us to ourselves and the places we photograph. The rough outlines below give an idea of what people will talk about and speakers include Beth and Thom Atkinson, Angus Carlyle, Susan Derges, Paul Gaffney, Max Houghton, Jem Southam, and Ester Vonplon.

Beth and Thom Atkinson will be talking about the secret history of London as made apparent in their Missing Buildings project, an enigma where the visible is made Visible and layers of the past are suddenly revealed.

Angus Carlyle will talk about sound and landscape, and how the one affects our experience of the other, how sound cuts through time, how sound creates pressure, how sound ties to emotion, memory and landscape. The screenshot below is from a project on a wartime hiding place/cave in Okinawa.

From The Cave Mouth and The Giant Voice by Rupert Cox and Angus Carlyle

Susan Derges has a practice that has evolved with herself. She makes amazing photograms that connect water, personal history and landscape, but for this weekend she will talk about her newest work - all will be revealed on the day.

Shoreline by Susan Derges

Paul Gaffney will look at the evolution of his psycho-geographical, intuition based landscapes. He will also be showing new work from his latest book which continues the intuition-based tradition of We Make the Path by Walking but is also very different..

Max Houghton will talk about language, literature and landscape, and how our knowledge of language shapes our experience of the world around us.

Carpet-Mounds by Colin Pantall

Jem Southam's practice connects to the landscape through the very personal act of walking. He uses time to capture the shifts of nature at the most basic level. He will talk about his latest work and returning to a photographic practice based firmly around the fields, rivers, ponds and coastlines of the Southwest of England.

The Exe River by Jem southam

Ester Vonplon photographs a Switzerland denuded of its familiar lyricism. She will talk about her Gletscherfahrt project and the commissioned sound/music blend that makes it such a emotionally powerful piece.

Tuesday, 7 July 2015

One of the most exciting things about photography is the different ways of telling stories that are emerging, the way that different ideas, emotions and senses are overlapping. And it's this overlap of images, ideas and senses that form the heart of a series of talks and screenings taking place in Bristol on November 7th (organised by Max Houghton of London College of Communication and myself).

Ester Vonplon will be there presenting and talking about her Glacier work. Susan Derges will talk about her water-based photograms, Jem Southam and Paul Gaffney will be looking at mind, landscape and walking, Angus Carlyle will talk about sound and landscape and how the one changes the other, and Max Houghton will talk about language and landscape, and how that affects our vision, experience and senses. There may be an addition here or there as well.

One of the interesting things about photobooks is when you get books that are great, but also go beyond the book form. Olivia Arthur's Stranger does that in a cinematic way, Ivars Gravlejs' Early Works does it by tying in to universal ideas of school and education, and Hidden Islam does it because it has such massive political relevance.

With all these books, you get the feeling that there is more to the work than just the book. The book is not an end in itself, but is a key to something else that is bigger than the book.

That's also the feeling I get with Ester Vonplon's Gletscherfahrt. Ester Vonplon is a photographer who shows a deromanticised vision of Switzerland and Gletscherfahrt is a project where romance is tossed out of the window. It's an elegy of a book where the textures and touch of the landscape comes across in pictures that have a gut-churning poignancy.

The book shows Vonplon's pictures of glaciers in Switzerland. These are retreating glaciers, melting glaciers. To protect them from further shrinkage, they have been wrapped in giant white reflective sheets. That's what Vonplon photographs. But she photographs them dirty. This is snow that is filled with sediment, grit, particulates and ash. Everything is a bit smoke-stained and grubby. There is no purely driven snow here. And it's all shrouded in these godforsaken bits of cloth that start of pristine but gradually rip and decay grey into the melting ice of the glacier. It's disease and decay and mortality. The ice has torn them apart.

And that's just the pictures. The book comes with a record and the record plays a score that was specially composed for the work. You can play the record and look at the pictures and you instantly get the idea of what has been made and why it has been made.

But there is also a slideshow (and if there isn't yet. I'm guessing be some kind of installation). And that's where the music-picture overlap really strikes you in the belly. It's a composition filled with ripping, dripping, flowing sounds of mortality, a composition that combines the music of Stephan Eicher with the location recordings of Vonplon. She records the sound of melting glacier water (Gletschermilch or 'glacier milk' is the touching German word for it).

It is something so beautiful and yet so sad. It's chilling. But Vonplon has captured that in pictures and sound in a way that really needs no explanation. It's there in the pictures and the music and it's heartbreaking.

That combination of pictures and sound is just one way of extending the photograph beyond the purely visual. It works beautifully. But with landscape there are people working with landscape, with psychology, with meditation, with film and sound in ways that go beyond the visual to provide insights into what it really feels like to be in a place and of a place.

And that's what the November event will look at, how we can beneath the surface of the landscape, how sound and words and music and self connect into the places where we walk, where we live, where we breathe... and last, and most definitely least, where we photograph.

Monday, 6 July 2015

Gerry Badger is the man who writes the words for the Photobook Histories. But he's also a photographer and It was a Grey Day (Photographs of Berlin) is his first photobook. And it's a really good one, a depiction of unpeopled greyness that captures a city on the brink of a change. It's the kind of change that will transform Badger's studies in grey into pictures of nostalgia that people will look back on with affection and wonder. It was a Grey Day is a study in the marginalia of a city, and it does a fantastic job.

Badger's a writer and a photographer. But he's also an architect and in the book he brings his architect's eye to a city where he is drawn to the spaces between buildings, to the gaps and the temporary structures that inhabit the city, that in Badger's eye almost define the city. Because of this, there's a formality to the pictures but at the same time they are not cold. They speak of spaces that are deserted but have life all around them.

This is Berlin's Terrain Vague, although it's not always of a large enough scale to be called that. It's more of an opportunistic seizing of space and repurposing of it through graffiti, sculpture, and a placing of rubbish and junk that is almost installation-like in its purposefulness. Are these spaces beautiful or ugly, Badger asks? And why is he so drawn to them? Badger concludes that it's not ruin or splendour he's photographing, but change, layer upon layer of change.

The book starts with a picture of a small supermarket. Above the window a line of graffiti reads, 'This is not America (Here is not Everywhere).' Just in case you didn't know, there's a manifesto for you.

The book continues into a grey claustrophobia. It's more than overcast (there's a corner of sky in almost every picture) and the concrete of the city is complete leaden. There are fences, there are trees and there is a sense of history that adds a certain gravity to the book.

There are repeated references to Atget's Terrain Vague pictures and there are nods to John Gossage's Berlin In the Time of the Wall, there are pictures of the Wall, but ultimately this is Badger's book and it settles into a pattern of images of different forms of dereliction and untidiness mixed with urban escapism; impromptu corners where Berliners escape the concrete and sit outside in these little pockets of human comfort. There's a checked sofa with a barbecue in front, benches of varying degrees of decrepitude and a courtyard with a sign saying 'Refugees Welcome, Tourists Piss Off!'

So it's not that comfortable, but it's not uncomfortable either. It's just messy and weighty, with link chains and fences creating a hierarchy of marginal landscapes. And that's what the book is, a kind of hierarchy of non-empty empty spaces; a book where you can unpick the subtle differences between Third Landscapes, Edgelands and Terrain Vague with concrete parking places, pathways, steel doors, stairways to nowhere and communal courtyards thrown into the mix. There's destruction mixed with collapse and decay and a sense that construction (and another kind of destruction) are not too far away. These are urban spaces that are up-for-grabs but aren't being grabbed because that is not the nature of the place. 'Smash Capitalism!' proclaims one sign, and in a sense that is what is being shown here because there's nothing here to be smashed.

In the afterword Badger writes 'In the normal course of events I spend my time writing about photographs - the photographs of others. Now, faced with a a group of my own photographs, I feel stuck for words.... I feel disembodied by them... they baffle me. I find them obtuse and quite mysterious.'

He writes about how he sees his pictures of Berlin and wonders at how downbeat they appear. On the surface this is a very dismal Berlin. But at the same time it's not. It's a Berlin that is of itself and by itself. For now. The dismal Berlin will come later, when the hand sculpture (which is already gone) and the gentrification of the city 'continues apace'.

Because tucked in behind Unseen, Amsterdam, on September 11th/12th/13th there's a festival called Gazebook Sicily. It's taking place in the small seaside town of Punta Secca (best known as the setting for Montalbano - an Italian TV show; it's Midsummer Murders but with sex, and in Italy). There's a beach and the brief includes beaches, gazebos and panama hats. There's room for that!

The festival has been in the planning for, ooh, months now, ever since Melissa Carnemolla, Bellina Teresa and Simone Sapienza managed to talk Cora Banche into contributing some Euros to fund the festival.

Simone Sapienza is a second year student on the Documentary Photography course at Newport where I teach. Last year the BJP asked me to get a picture of Martin Parr holding a copy of the magazine. Simone saw that. He asked me to get a picture of Parr holding a sign promoting Gazebook Sicily. I did that, but I got a bit carried away and asked a few other people. So here are just some of my favourites. But thank you so much to everyone who helped out (even if, especially if, you had no idea what you were promoting).

7pm Boy Old Boy, by Roberto Boccaccino. Link between the project and its dissemination
9pm "La guerra, una storia siciliana" by Tony Gentile - book about mafia in Sicily in 90s'
10pm Italia o Italia, by Clavarino

Wednesday, 1 July 2015

Hold the Line by Siegfried Hansen is an eye-catcher of a book. The eye-catching starts with the cover. It's a book of street photography and the front cover shows a man standing on a yellow line painted on what looks like airport tarmac. Whatever it is, it's tarmac that is battleship grey, and as well as yellow, there are black, white and red lines running parallel and in diagonals.

It's a graphic book then, but it's also one that with strict compositional rules. Hansen is an engineer and you get the feeling that he likes things just so. That comes across in pictures that have a lot of New Topographics in them. There are nods to Lewis Baltz and Robert Adams as crossed perpendiculars surfaces mix with profiles in windows.

But it's all in colour, with the bluest of skies and the goldest of yellows. And it's a populated book. There are people in it but not your usual street photography people. They are cut-off and foreshortened, they appear in diagonal views in which foreground structures create little frames for the people of the book to inhabit. It starts with the front edge of a car moving down a highway boxed in green, and continues with a women cut at the waist by an olive fascia. A foot in running shoes is seen in the top of a frame filled with brutalist playground equipment, there's a view of a man walking down an underpass and several pictures of people half blurred behind sheets of perspex and glass.

There are more photographic nods, some of which might be intentional, some not. Traces of Saul Leiter, Cartier-Bresson, Kertesz, Vivianne Sassen, Eammon Doyle, and Isabelle Wenzel mix with a strong feeling of the early colour of Keld-Helmer Petersen. And those references, incidental or otherwise, are central to what makes Hold the Line such a great book. You're seeing something that you've seen before, but in a style that Hansen has made his own. He's doing the same thing others have done, but he's doing it differently. That's a really difficult thing to do, especially in an arena so laden with heavyweight genre as street photography.

Images are cut with colour pages that take the vibrancy down a notch and this adds to the early feel. Hold the Line is a clinical book (with sentiments that are similar in some ways to Martino Marangino's Alone Together), and in some ways I would like it to lose a couple of the more blurry shots and be even more clinical. But at the same time, it looks fantastic and it's strangely fun to look at; a puzzle book where lines join, lines cross and we all march along their unerring path. So it's a book about obedience?